Horse Feathers wears the weather on its sound

May 2, 2012

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The Pacific Northwest is a natural influence on the music Justin Ringle makes in his melancholy alternative-folk band Horse Feathers. It’s a sound built for a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Ringle, who grew up in Idaho and moved to Portland, Ore., in 2004, said the climate affects his songwriting both consciously and subconsciously.

“That’s just a natural element of the whole area. I think everybody gets a little seasonal affective (disorder) in the Northwest to some degree,” Ringle said by phone last week as the band was driving across Montana to a gig in Minnesota. They’ll arrive in Vermont for a show tonight at Higher Ground.

“It kind of creates a little bit of forced introversion,” Ringle said of the weather in his home area. “For me, personally, it’s hard to avoid having that kind of creep in somehow.”

It’s not that Ringle is fighting that reflective feeling. He’s attracted to it, referring to that dark tone as “a kind of catharsis.

“For whatever reason it just seems like that sound is how I usually want to express myself musically, just that kind of mood. I’ve always kind of gravitated toward that sound,” Ringle said. “I’m a fan of a lot of things like that. I enjoy that music. It’s almost like, in a kind of sadistic way, watching the drama of someone else bleeding. It’s like, ‘Oh, they’re so wounded.’ Somehow just that distance between you and that music, there’s some kind of enjoyment found in that.”

The new Horse Feathers album, “Cynic’s New Year,” is the band’s fourth, and keeps that probing, low-key vibe going that the group began in 2006 with “Words Are Dead” and followed up at two-year intervals with “House With No Home” and “Thistled Spring.” The new work, though, takes things in a slightly different direction, according to Ringle. He said “Cynic’s New Year” was recorded mostly in his home studio, which gave him and producer Skyler Norwood a host of musicians in town to draw upon.

“The process was a little more collaborative in terms of arriving at the sound,” Ringle said. “That shaped the record in different ways, which was cool. It was just kind of a different perspective. (With) the previous record, I’d been touring with the same band for a little bit so we kind of worked on the material, and this one was more free. It was just a little bit looser process in that sense.”

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“Cynic’s New Year” increased the variety of instrumentation compared to past Horse Feathers albums, according to Ringle, which gave him and Norwood lots to choose from when they put the final product together.

“It was cool, because we would just get a number of takes from all these musicians and try to guide them as much as we could to figure out how it worked in the tune, and then we stepped back and started to arrange it further in the mixing process,” Ringle said. “It was almost like some of the arrangements are like a curation of several people’s parts.”

That different approach doesn’t drastically change the tone of the new album compared to its predecessors, however. That downcast sound isn’t one Ringle plans to let go of any time soon.

“People want to say it’s gloomy,” he said. “I just want to say it’s more real.”